


Wound Me Gently

by girl_wonder



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-28
Updated: 2011-05-28
Packaged: 2017-10-19 20:41:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/204993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girl_wonder/pseuds/girl_wonder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Narcissa holds these things as betrayals to her name.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wound Me Gently

Before she was Narcissa Malfoy, she was Narcissa Black, proud and beautiful.

Narcissa has always regretted that Draco could never hold the Black name under his heart like she did, that he would never know how it rides like a crown on her brow and an accusation over her lips, but she always forgave Lucius for this final betrayal of her name as she forgave him for all of his sins.

The first of these she lists on her skin in the invisible shape of skull where everyone imagined it should be. The second she finds in the emptiness of her home, where her footsteps do not echo, where other voices are no longer heard around her table. She lives in the moment of her greatest success and will until the house crumbles beneath her heel.

The third will always be his first sin, and that was the only one she almost did not forgive. She cannot scratch the betrayal of Severus from her heart as easily as she can wipe away the marks of her own.

Narcissa is what she was raised to be: loyal beyond sense, beyond nobility, to her family, her house, her husband, her son and, last, her love. Although she will cry for loss of any of them except for the latter.

*****

When Severus said, "Don't make me," Narcissa was Narcissa Black and she could say, "Please," without breaking an Unbreakable Vow.

He never tried to say no again, and she was relieved, although she regretted his passive acceptance and missed his intellect.

*****

Written in black ink with a black quill, the list of people that Narcissa Malfoy would never invite to her dinners:

Lionel and Martha Strunt  
Jaques and Urlia Monteclau  
Berlin Carland  
Any of the Longbottoms  
Andromeda Tonks nee Black  
Severus Snape

*****

This was her wedding vow: I will be loyal, I will be honorable, I will never betray my husband unless I, first, am betrayed.

She was a Black and a Slytherin as well. Both insist on loopholes and this was hers: all of his sins could be counted as betrayals if she should choose. Although unbreakable, her vow was far from permanent. When she chose, she would count death as Lucius's ultimate betrayal.

*****

At fifteen Narcissa knew who she would be at twenty, she knew who she would be at fifty. Although Severus would never understand because he thought it her own vanity that made her marry Lucius, she had already married Lucius at birth and would marry him again and again throughout her life. Everything has been done and will be done again, Bellatrix whispered into Narcissa's ear at her husband's funeral. But for the Aurors and her bound wrists, Narcissa would have ripped her sister's tongue out.

This was the funeral that they gave her husband: half of a minute for her to kiss his lips and half of a minute for his corpse to burn.  
Accidental death, of course, not that it mattered. Severus was not allowed to attend, but she still saw him later, and accepted the vial he provided.

"I am the most brilliant potions mind in the past century," he said into her silence. "They will not kill me until they have drained me dry."

In her cell, later, she supposed that it was understandable that her silence had been seen as accusing.

If Narcissa Malfoy was not guilty of killing Dumbledore, the prosecutor at her trial had said, she was more than guilty of causing it. She had designed the situation so that no matter what had happened, Dumbledore would die.

After someone had died, Narcissa knew it was easier to remember him with fondness. She remembered her father as intelligent and her mother as loving. The world remembered Dumbledore as a hero. She could only remember how cold it had been when he had turned on her fellow Slytherins during that first, horrible war.

Narcissa refused to answer to Narcissa Malfoy after the funeral.

*****

He was taller than she for the entire time she knew him. Even when Azkaban made him hunched and ruined, she still found herself looking upwards to his face.

At 11, Severus was only a few inches above her, and he covered it with the invisibility of shy children. She never would have noticed him, if not for the knowledge that he was in her house and he did better than anyone in school at potions. Whenever she faked a bad transfiguration, it was his eyes on her, accusing.

The first thing he had ever said to her at all was said with the tone he would later develop to frighten first years, "Whoever told you that being stupid and weak would make men love you more does not deserve your attention."

*****  
From the stolen moments of youthful solipsism, the shed was as she remembered it.

He was there before her, and turned when she slid open the door. "Don't make me."

"Please," Narcissa put her hand out and he crossed the few feet to take it. She felt new dryness and old calluses when Severus brought her knuckles to his mouth. It was familiarity that made her turn her hand so that he could kiss her palm as well.

"Love magic is Dark Magic, Narcissa." He did not drop her hand.

"I know. But..." She looked at where his hand clasped hers. "Which do you think is better? Love or hate?"

His smile was almost invisible save for the tightness of his mouth, "Love. But I can offer you something far more reasonable."

******

The Auror is a new one, someone who is too young to have known the first war, and barely old enough to fight in the second. "We found Draco," she says.

Narcissa does not hope. "What do you want?"

"Where is Ron buried?"

Narcissa wants to dig her fingers into the table, bury her nails in so deep that the wood's innate magic will seep into her through splinters and her blood will flow sparkling dangerous. The table is oak and that's careless of them, because oak is the most easily transfigured wood and if she had her wand she would kill them all for not bringing her son to her.

"Show me my son," Narcissa holds few cards in her hands anymore, she had bartered so many to stay her execution. For Draco she will sell her soul without regret.

The Arour says, "Where is Ron?" in a hard, choking voice and Narcissa knows. For all these years, she can read a Black woman in a stranger by the tilt of the head, the self-centered knowledge of self and of family. Mostly, though, she knows the fist clench from her sister.

"Nymphadora, go back and tell them that I will give them anything, but only if I can keep my son." She stares until the Auror shoves back her chair and leaves.

For Draco, she would kill and she hoped that the Aurors know it.

*****

The first time that she fell in love with Lucius was when they were children and forced to play together, as children who are betrothed usually are. He was blond and she loved him passionately as she loved all things that reminded her of herself.

Severus had black hair that hung lank from his head and she hated it deep inside where she put her hatred of burlap and plaid. The first time that she tied it back and saw the grimace on his face, she smiled without compassion and he said low, "You would make a good Quidditch player."

"I'm a girl," she turned back to her book, guarded from the sunlight by the dark shade of their oak.

"You're ruthless," he replied, but said no more and did not offer to return her ribbon.

*****

At the Transfiguration NEWTS, Lily said, "You cheated," and because she was Head Girl, they checked.

Later, of course, they tried to apologize, but it was too late. The illusion of wood turned forest life was gone and she waved her wand violently. Even Lily seemed shocked to see the animated deer burn.

It was not in him to say, "It was beautiful" nor to wipe away her tears. Instead he handed her Dreamless Sleep and a rotten piece of wood he had found in the forest. She still saw it as it had been in her head, and found that she could show him without bitterness.

Lucius hexed Lily and Narcissa smiled as one who is impressed will smile.

*****

They brought her Draco and she cries for the first time in years. She kisses him and holds him tightly, before pushing him back and running her fingers across his forehead.

His unblemished wrists she brings to her mouth, and kisses over and over again the spot where manacles would have shredded his pale skin. Finally he shakes her away and moves farther than her chains will let her follow. "Mother," he says, "I..."

For the first time she realizes that there is not just guards, but Aurors and... Potter. The boy who somehow managed to defeat the Dark Lord.

"You were the spy, I know," her voice is steady. "Will they imprison you?"

He shakes his head, staring at her shackled wrists with what she suddenly recognizes as distaste. It is her twist of lip, her eyebrow reflected back at her.

"Alright," she turns then to Harry, the boy who had taken her son from her. "They buried the girl Weasley in my garden, under the nightshade." There is something ironic in her smile.

Harry nods once, and walks out. She can not find it in her to be surprised when Draco does not stay much longer.

*****

The second time she fell in love with Lucius was the first day of school, he reached for her hand and she allowed him to lead her. Two years older than her, he knew his way around the school and took her everywhere she had dreamed of.

She hated him, though, one year later because he led another girl instead of her and he looked too much like her for her to love.

*****

This is the story that Narcissa learned:

Narcissus was so beautiful that he fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. In time, though, he began to hate the thing, as it was only a pale imitation of himself. He spent all of his time staring at it, trying to find a way to remove what he began to see as a mockery from the water.

Eventually a god took pity on him and changed him into a flower, which multiplied without discretion, each a perfect copy of the last. Flowers feel no jealousy for their reflections in lakes or puddles or mirrors. In fact, flowers feel nothing at all but the push of a breeze and the heat of the sun.

*****

"I couldn't testify at your trial," Draco says. This time he has come with and unfamiliar repentance, she does not recognize it and it frightens her.

"Of course," she says. It is two days before she needs a dose and she counts the minutes as she looks at her son.

The war changed him, she now sees. He is tired in a way that Lucius would have covered with glamours. Tired in a way that she had taught him never to be. The first rule of the Black women: never appear to be any less than perfection.

When he was nine, she bought him his first Perfection Mirror. As most magical mirrors do, it talks back, incessantly listing physical faults, only silent when its owner looks perfect. At nine, a child is young enough to take insults to heart, yet old enough to be able to change his appearance. Narcissa's own mirror had been silent for years. "Your hair looks like something lives in it," the mirror told her son. Narcissa had closed the door when she left his room.

"Mother," he recaptures her attention and she looks at him without seeing her son.

*****

Italy was hot, hotter than she was used to, inexcusably made more unbearable by her clothing. Even summer robes were too much.

Most days she wore the sundresses that Andromeda brought back from wandering the muggle streets, even though Narcissa refused to leave the house in anything but the latest Wizard fashions. She would sit out in the garden, reading, letting the cool breeze touch her thighs.

For every hour that Andromeda spent with her sister, there were five that she spent out of the house. Narcissa did not wonder where she went, and never asked.

Instead Narcissa spent her days reading what Severus owled her, long, dry books about Transfiguration theory and practice. She never replied to the gifts until the day that Andromeda did not return at all.

He arrived within hours, and stayed until Narcissa finally wrote to her parents about the disappearance.

*****

One of five spells that Severus wrote for Narcissa alone:

 _sibi mortem consisce_

*****  
Narcissa --

I don't expect you to understand now, maybe not even when you're older, but I can't go back home. You know that I don't love Darian, and I don't want to marry him even if it is expected.

Instead, I'm going to marry Ted Tonks. I'm sorry for leaving you.

Your sister,  
Andromeda

 

*****

Severus has a collection of hair ribbons that she gave to him over the course of twenty-eight years. When they tear apart his house looking for some sort of leverage, they find all of them collected in an oak box.

With his eyes closed, Draco holds a gossamer ribbon to his nose and shudders in horror.

*****

That summer would forever remind Narcissa of the cheap blackberry wine that Severus managed to find for them. Bird songs on hot days would make her remember the oak they would read under, silent and focused.

For years she refused to follow Lucius to Italy when he summered there.

Too much sun, she would say and gesture at her ivory skin. Even when Lucius asked, she kept Draco's hand in hers and said, "Don't be ridiculous, darling, his skin is as pale as mine."

*****

When she imagines how it went, Narcissa pictures this:

A group of a few of the most important wizards in the world sit around a table, trying to figure out how to keep Severus working for them. Draco would be hesitant, but willing to risk it. "I think that he cares about my mother."

Potter would have looked surprised, a common emotion. That Granger mudblood would have looked horrified. "Your mother?" she probably would have said, as if it needed further explaining.

No one would have liked to think of it, as though it was too disgusting to imagine. Draco would have pulled the box out and presented one of the ribbons, to him solid proof, to the rest of them something that could have been anyone's.

"It's hers," he would say and then he would remove one of the few notes she had sent to Severus over the years.

She had sent far fewer notes than ribbons.

*****

The first time that she missed her monthly cycle, she shut herself in her bedroom. It took a few times to get the words out without crying, but she managed them in one rush.

Two days later, she came out, pale and shaking. The house elves were so relieved that two of them followed her around all day, and attended to everything she wanted before she knew to ask for it.

She never spoke the words again, and never told Severus what she had used the spell for.

*****

Severus --

Andromeda is gone. Come to Italy and visit me.

N

*****

Draco waves the note in front of Severus.

"Do you love my mother?"

"What you want to know is if your mother loves me."

Harry stands back and lets Draco scream until he has no voice.

*****

She had nothing left to give him, here, so she took the empty vial and a sharp piece of glass from the last one. Her blood is so rich that when they were still in school, there were some spells that he wouldn't let her near.

"Your blood is too pure," he picked up her hand by the wrist and paused for half of a moment before sliding the knife along her palm. She still remembered the snap of explosions in the potions classroom even after so much time.

When Draco was very young, she asked Severus for something to make him protected from such dangers.

"Your husband's line isn't as pure as the Blacks'. It shouldn't be an issue," on her hip, Draco moved awkwardly, his hands waving fussily. What Severus had no reason to say was: my blood is too impure to be an issue.

"It is," she said, and Snape gave her a small jar of something green to rub on every inch of Draco's skin.

*****

She finds out that they know when they drag her before them all, her hands tied in front of her. Severus is sitting at his workbench.

"If you don't help us, I'll tell her."

*****

This is the story of a mother who loved her child too much:

The baby they called Achilles, and the mother was a queen. As such, she was not allowed to raise her son, but forced, instead, to hand him to a nursemaid and watch as someone else raised him.

That did not stop her from loving him. Love so rarely follows expectations. So, when she found the nursemaid holding the child over the fire by his heel, she screamed and rescued him.

When her son died because of that heel, the one part of him that she had saved from the fire, she was already dead and could not regret it.

*****

Draco's skin did not bruise, nor bleed, and she was relieved. Lucius, who had wanted to use the pure blood for spells, was not as comforted.

These are the ingredients for a spell of breaking:  
willow bark  
used coal  
ground dragon scales  
innocent blood (preferably pureblood)

to make it a Heartbreaking Spell add the heart of a newborn rabbit.

*****

At seventeen, about eight months before she would marry Lucius Malfoy, she took her first dose.

Lily Evans found her afterwards. As far as Narcissa remembered, because the side effects the first few times had been horrible, the conversation went like this:

"Sirius told me that you're marrying Lucius Malfoy," Lily was standing with her arms crossed.

"Yes," Narcissa could bear saying it without the ache of terror, she _could_ now. "I will marry Lucius."

"He said that you've been engaged to him since you were _born._ "

Narcissa reached up to stroke the owl on her shoulder.

"Doesn't that strike you as wrong? You shouldn't be forced to marry someone!" Lily, as she recalled, had been vehement, horrified at how feminism had been so disregarded.

For the second time in her life, Narcissa tried to see it from someone else's perspective. What if she loved someone and was still bound to Lucius, what then? What if she hated Lucius? What if...

This is the only thing she remembered clearly. She looked up at Lily, who despite their years of hatred, the years of insults and cruelty, was still so ready to go to war for her, "No," she said.

*****

Narcissa smiles after that bold little statement, it seems appropriate that the mudblood would be the one to confront Snape about the illusion that they maintained. Narcissa has an exceptional appreciation for dramatic irony.

"That potion that you've been drinking is poison."

Beside the mudblood, Snape's mouth is tight in a way that Narcissa recognizes from one, long, summer in Italy.

"Yes," Narcissa stands tall and recognizes the flash of blond from the corner of her eye before she sees her son.

He is in all of his glory, and she knows him again, "Mother! He's been _poisoning_ you."

"Mr. Malfoy, I would think that you, of all people, would know the other properties of the ingredients."

For ten seconds there is silence, and she glances at Severus with amusement. They are third years again and double teaming Griffyndors.

"Severus has been poisoning me for years. I think that after all this time, if he really meant to kill me, he would have." Narcissa sits down on one of the few chairs in the room, regal.

"What does the potion do?" Her son (how proud she is, watching him) grinds out.

Snape's mouth tightens again, this time sullenly. Her potion is his crowning glory, not the first of his brilliance, but it is his irony. Slowly poisoning the thing he loves the best, representative of so much about him.

"What does it do?" The mudblood is close to Snape, shaking the vial.

"What are the properties of the Narcissus flower?" Snape counters. "Come, Miss Granger, even you must know."

"Poison," she says immediately.

"It cuts out a wizard's heart," Draco says. "Makes them only able to care about themselves."

Narcissa closes her eyes.

*****

Her first year at Hogwarts, she used spells to scent her hair, make her skin smell like honeysuckle. It took her an entire year to realize that the scent was overpowering and bad.

She was jasmine for her second and third years.

Lilac her fourth, melon her fifth.

Her sixth and seventh years she smelled slightly of pear.

After her wedding she stopped wearing the fanciful scents she wore in school. Instead, she went to a designer and had a scent personally developed for herself. Of course, she paid with her husband's money.

During the summer of her fifth year she let the spells lapse because no one but Severus was near enough to tell.

*****

The third spell that Severus created for Narcissa:

 _crea filium mihi care me_

*****

Severus, of course, tried to make up for his blood. He was the Half-Blood Prince, and when she found out she told him that he was being absurd.

Pretentious, she called him, false airs. He glanced at her wrist, where the blue veins showed brilliantly through her pale skin.

"Would it make any difference if I were pureblood?"

Narcissa covered her wrists quickly, "No."

"Your line is at the end of its purity. Bellatrix is barren, Andromeda has married a muggleborn," Severus added, cruelly. "And you. The Malfoys have bad breeding that they can strike from their tree, but not their blood."

*****

Behind her closed lids, Severus talks to them as though they are students again. "Mr. Malfoy, you are not paying attention. What else is in the poison I am giving your mother?"

"It makes them only able to care about people with their blood," the mudblood works out.

"Ten points from Griffyndor for taking so long." She opens her eyes to catch the tail end of his irony.

That was one of the things she had loved about him.

*****

When Draco was born, Lucius had been gone for a month. He immediately Apparated home, of course. His child was held up to him, pale skin glowing and eyes open only a slit, but recognizably blue. He was a Malfoy heir, and Lucius kissed his brow with this in mind.

The baby was born early, by at least two weeks. Everyone, except for Narcissa, was surprised that the pale thing survived.

She smiled demurely and out of the corner of her eyes, if she squinted, she saw Draco as he would be, proud, arrogant, self-assured and Black.

There are spells that can be done, which reveal the exact moment of conception. Often, they are off by a few minutes and Lucius always assumed that was the case with his first born, an assumption Narcissa never, ever, challenged, even when she was furious.

It was not a betrayal of her husband, because she did it knowing that he would never know the difference. She did it knowing that there would be none except for the difference in her heart. With his every breath she loved him as she loved herself, selfishly, unbounded.

*****

She answers because he asks. "The boy Weasley is still alive."

He stares at her with that so familiar gaze and she feels her heart beat with relief alone. "Where?"

"I believe the your father developed a cage for him, somewhere in the basement. A magical one," she adds at Potter's furious stare. "He should still be alive, if there are still house elves to feed him."

It is the last card she wishes to play, and she does it carelessly. If anyone knows what that last gesture means, it will be Severus.

Narcissa kills herself using rope, because she wants the end of her life to make as little sense as possible.

She does not leave a note, and trusts that her death will be listed as "accidental." It is her own betrayal.

*****

end


End file.
